Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore

And do not forget, lastly, to ask, whether at Liverpool or at the British Museum, for the Holtenias and their congeners,— hollow sponges built up of glassy spicules, and rooted in the mud by glass hairs, in some cases between two and three feet long, as flexible and graceful as tresses of snow-white silk. Look at these, and a hundred kindred forms, and then see how nature is not only “maxima in minimis”— greatest in her least, but often “pulcherrima in abditis”— fairest in her most hidden works; and how the Creative Spirit has lavished, as it were, unspeakable artistic skill on lowly-organized creature, never till now beheld by man, and buried, not only in foul mud, but in their own unsightly heap of living jelly. But so it was from the beginning;— and this planet was not made for man alone. Countless ages before we appeared on earth the depths of the old chalk-ocean teemed with forms as beautiful and perfect as those, their lineal descendants, which the dredge now brings up from the Atlantic sea-floor; and if there were— as my reason tells me that there must have been— final moral causes for their existence, the only ones which we have a right to imagine are these— that all, down to the lowest Rhizopod, might delight themselves, however dimly, in existing; and that the Lord might delight Himself in them.